Enigma

by Paul Bew

  Keppel Street was exasperating in another way; Parnell regarded these ‘digs’ as beneath his due standing. ‘It plainly stung his pride to have to live in furnished apartments in a poor lodging-house in Bloomsbury.’45 Avondale too had a look of ‘neglect’ and ‘decay’ from the outside,46 and inside was little better, for the parlour was neither homely nor cheerful. ‘One might fancy that the coverings had just been drawn off the furniture at the expiration of a Chancery suit.’47 Anyway, at the end of 1880 Parnell told a visiting journalist that since he had given up agriculture for politics he had not spent six nights at Avondale. It is true that there was a billiard table which dominated the entrance hall at Avondale and a cricket pitch laid out in the grounds. But Parnell no longer had the lifestyle and friends that went with such accoutrements. Soon the train set and the billiard table gave way to the comfort the charming Mrs O’Shea made available for him at her home at Eltham in Kent. It may have been a romantic and illicit liaison but it also provided Parnell with a surprisingly conventional and much-needed domesticity. Katharine was an intelligent and persuasive woman. She provided Parnell with an open affection which his immediate family often seems to have denied him. She too was well satisfied: ‘For a woman of my temperament Parnell was the ideal lover,’ she later told reporters.48

  Did O’Shea know of his wife’s liaison which was a subject of gossip in London political circles from 1881? In an able series of letters he later denied that he had firm knowledge of his wife’s affaire. But it is unlikely that he was telling the full truth. In 1881 the two men almost came to the point of fighting a duel. By 1882 Parnell had had a cricket pitch laid out at Eltham. He was soon to establish a study and a laboratory there so that he could continue to practise his favourite hobby. As Katharine herself said in an interview with Henry Harrison after the publication of her memoirs: ‘Did Captain O’Shea know? Of course he knew. . . . There was no bargain; there were no discussions; people do not talk of such things. But he knew, and he actually encouraged me in it at times.’49 In short, Captain O’Shea calculated that Parnell’s relationship with his wife might issue in some political advancement for himself.

  From this point on, Mrs O’Shea became a vital part of Parnell’s life and political career. ‘My own wifie’, ‘My own darling Queenie’, as Parnell called her, became not just his companion but also an important political intermediary. Often she carried Parnell’s missives to prominent British politicians, of whom at least some were aware of her true status in his life. But above all, she made a home for a man who—some time in 1882, it would appear—definitively tired of the agrarian agitator’s life. As F. H. O’Donnell wryly put it: ‘His business address was Kill Sassenach, Ballyslaughter, Ireland; but his tastes were in the little villa at Eltham, Kent.’50

  4

  However, in the early weeks and months, the O’Shea liaison was of little political importance. Richard O’Shaughnessy, the Limerick MP, now sent a public letter to Parnell, asking to join the Land League: ‘Will you kindly propose me as a member of the Land League? My principles are peace and goodwill to the landlords who will give their tenants secure and inviolable tenure at fair rent? Compulsory expropriation at a fair price to the landlords who refuse to give such tenure or insist on exorbitant rents.’51 It was an important moment—O’Shaughnessy was a respected moderate. A year earlier Parnell had tried but failed to win him over to the Land League; his conversion now signalled that the Land League was in control of the Irish political agenda, at least temporarily. Parnell told the central executive committee of the Land League, which met in Dublin:

  I think he means by that those landlords willing voluntarily to give their tenants secure and inviolable tenure at fair rents; compulsory expropriation at a fair price to the landlords who refuse to give such a tenure or insist on exorbitant rents. I think he means by that those landlords willing voluntarily to give their tenants leases for ever, even in the face of continued depression or in face of bad seasons, should be excepted from the compulsory purchase scheme of the Land League. . . . If his proposition be that all landlords who give their tenants leases for ever, without the right to such tenant to sell the whole or any portion of his holding, but not giving the right to sublet (hear, hear)—I am inclined to think that would practically be an occupying proprietary (hear, hear). The tenants would be in the position of occupying proprietors, with the exception that their annual payments would go forever. The landlords would be converted into rent chargers (hear, hear) and I think, as rent chargers, they would sell voluntarily to their tenants (hear, hear) and that would bring about a termination of the annual payments in that way.52

  Much more significant was the fact that, in the autumn and winter of 1880, Parnell effectively ceased to act as a restraining force on the land agitation. He made no effort to keep the brake on. (This should not, of course, be confused with any suggestion that Parnell condoned violence.) He pursued the stated objectives of the campaign with maximum vigour. He had, in truth, little enough option but to be swept along and to accept also the fact that the somewhat stronger farmers of the south and east were now part of a truly national movement.

  His role as ‘the Chief remained important, of course, but he was a catalyst rather than a purposeful or well-informed leader. He refused to be drawn on discussions of the technicalities of land reform. Partly, at least, this was because he did not have any great competence in such matters. But there was also a deeper and more compelling reason. There are times when a political leader must accept that he cannot direct or shape an agitation; the turbulent latter half of 1880 in Ireland was one such time. As tens of thousands of tenants flooded into the Land League ranks Parnell flirted more and more openly with radical schemes to establish a peasant proprietary and abolish the institution of landlordism.

  This did not mean that he had reneged on his personal desire to bring the younger and more progressive Irish landlords into the Home Rule movement so as to give it sufficient cachet to sway British legislators. At New Ross, Co. Wexford, in late September 1880 he stated his arguments with the usual force:

  Fellow-countrymen and ladies of the counties of Wexford, Waterford, Carlow and Kilkenny, I would wish to give you some practical advice, however shortly, upon the necessity which rests on this and the neighbouring counties for organisation among the tenant farmers themselves (hear, hear). When the Compensation for Disturbance Bill was brought forward last session in the House of Commons, the counties and the people who I am now addressing—namely the four counties of Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny and Carlow—were excluded, with the exception of a small portion of the county of Wexford. The whole county of Mayo was included in the bill, and the whole county of Galway, and many other parts of Ireland were included in the bill, but you were left out. Now why were you left out? It was because you had not raised your voices; because you had not organised yourselves and shown the determination and power of the thousands of people who live in these counties (cheers). But I think that after today, and after the practical work that it will be our duty to see what follows the proceedings of today, there will be no fear that the people of these counties will be left out of the coming land bill.53

  Parnell was here making the point that British law-makers would reward only those regions of the country which became involved in agitation. He then moved on to discuss his more general assessment of the land question. Here he wished to make the point that, as there was so little British support for the so-called ‘three Fs’ solution, the agitation should keep its focus on peasant proprietorship.

  All the great statesmen who have spoken of the system of land tenure have condemned the fixing of rents by the state. Mr Gladstone, Mr Bright and Mr Forster have repeatedly declared that they will be no party to state arbitration of what rents should be. All the advanced section in England, with the exception of Mr Courtney and some one or two others, take the same line, and therefore in the face of such declarations, I fail to see the utility of struggling for such a method of settling t
he land question, which we shall never get, and which if we did get would only perpetuate the system of landlordism which has destroyed the country.

  We seek as Irish Nationalists for a settlement of the land question which shall ever be permanent, which shall forever put an end to the war of classes which unhappily has existed in this country—and which supplies in the words in the resolution ‘the strongest inducement to Irish landlords to uphold the system of English misrule’ which has placed these landlords in Ireland.

  And looking forward to the future of our country, we wish to avoid all elements of antagonism between classes. I am willing to have a struggle between classes in Ireland, a struggle that shall be short, sharp and decisive (hear, hear and cheers), once and for all (cheers) but I am not willing that this struggle should be perpetuated at intervals when these periodic revaluations of the holdings of the tenants would come under a system of what is called fixity of tenure at valued rents.

  And now, in conclusion, I would say one word to you. I would entreat every tenant farmer not to look at the land question from a selfish point of view. You have today the first real opportunity you ever had of settling it, and believe me that when the land question has been finally settled, we should be in a position to claim with irresistible force the restoration of our old Parliament (cheers). Some well-meaning men are saying today: Don’t continue this agitation—don’t continue this movement. You are driving the landlords out of the national ranks (laughter). I should like to know when the landlords since the Union were in the national ranks (never). It is nonsense to expect them to be in the national ranks when they know their only hope of maintaining their right to commit wrong lies in the maintenance of English power in Ireland (cheers); and if it is desirable to have them in the national ranks, I tell you that the best way of bringing [these] men there [the national ranks] is to take from them the right to do wrong—to destroy the system of landlordism which was planted here by England in order that she might divide Ireland’s sons among themselves—to maintain her power.54

  It is all here. The privileged position of Irish landlords had kept them for the most part outside nationalist ranks. The way to bring them into nationalist politics was not to drop the land agitation, but to force it to a successful conclusion. Preferably that conclusion was the establishment of a peasant proprietary in Ireland. Such a settlement prepared the way for a new patriotic unity of all the Irish social classes. It also opened up the prospect of perpetual social peace. ‘If it is desirable to have them [the landlords] in the national ranks,’ he says—but every private, and many public, indications reveal that he thought it was indeed desirable.

  It was a stirring argument. Whether all the subtleties were grasped by his enthusiastic audience of 20,000 people is, of course, debatable. But there is nothing inherently absurd in Parnell’s view.

  The weak points are, of course, apparent. Parnell’s theory neglected the role of the British political parties, in particular the Conservatives. Nevertheless, Parnell did not fail to achieve a response of some sort in Irish landlord ranks. They rejected Parnell’s nationalism as a sentimental irrelevance, but they felt that they might benefit by his project of forcing the British Treasury to finance an Irish land reform. Paradoxical as it may seem, the pro-landlord writer Standish James O’Grady (1846–1928; not to be confused with his cousin, Standish Hayes O’Grady, the eminent Celtic scholar, 1832–1915), in The Crisis in Ireland (1882), a pamphlet addressed to his fellow landlords, spoke of a ‘splendid opportunity presented to the landowners of this county during the first twelve months of the Land League agitation’. According to O’Grady, at this stage the peasantry were still ready to bargain and compromise with the landowners. ‘Parnell and his powerful Irish phalanx’, he was later to write, ‘did not really desire to hurt the Irish landlords but to help Irish tenants, and it was nothing to them if our landlords got compensation from the Treasury.’ O’Grady went on to claim that ‘many considerable landlords in all parts of the country’ accepted that this was true. They accepted also that ‘the agrarian revolution inaugurated by Parnell would have to run its course’; consequently they ‘resolved to apply themselves, not to the task of resisting it but that of persuading the Imperial Conservative Party’ to support generous state compensation for the expropriated ‘garrison’.55 However, the Conservative leadership was eventually converted to such a proposal, though it was to be a process of rather slow learning.

  It was not within Parnell’s power—or that of any man—to ensure that the struggle remained within the confines set for it, ‘short, sharp and decisive’. The establishment of peasant proprietorship was, in fact, a somewhat protracted even if, after 1882, inevitable process. Then, of course, the process was also a bloody one—much more so than Parnell hoped, though, of course, he always had his fears. Yet there is a point that requires to be stressed. When Parnell spoke in late September 1880, outrage was not such a very important feature of the Irish agrarian agitation. The really significant increase in outrages occurred in the last three months of the year. It was, in September 1880, still not unreasonable for Parnell to see outrage (as he explicitly stated later in this speech) as the product of the absence of a Land League organisation rather than its presence. We cannot, therefore, say that Parnell’s credo was a political fantasy designed to exorcise his own fears about the violence of the movement he was leading.

  But there was an obdurate Ireland which existed quite independently of Parnell’s aspirations. Part of the reality of this Ireland was increasing agrarian crime. Nearly 1,700 of the 2,590 agrarian outrages of 1880 (including threatening letters) were committed in the last three months of the year. It was a rise that he was to claim that he did not expect. Of course, most of this crime took place in the most deprived areas of the west; again, even in the west, and more so in the rest of the country, legal methods of rent resistance were more important to Land League success than crime. Nevertheless, Irish landlords were bound to be frightened by the upsurge of violence, and many were in no mood to listen to blandishments from a man who appeared to be associated with it.

  For Parnell’s rhetoric continued to be apparently ultra-radical. In December 1880 he even spoke again as he had in America of settling some of the western population on the eastern grasslands. However, a few days later the necessity for such a scheme was called in question by the influential figure of Professor Baldwin, who ran the government model farm in Ireland: in the course of giving evidence before the Richmond Commission, which had been set up to inquire into the causes of agricultural distress, Baldwin argued that no migration from the west to the east was required to deal with the problem of overcrowding on the land. There was enough suitable land in the west. Parnell was quick to take the hint from the expert and after Baldwin’s remarks did not again refer to a migration to the east. December 1880 seems to have marked the high point of his ‘leftism’. However, his remarks never seemed to have worried the farming bourgeoisie in the south and the east in any case. The need for rhetorical excess seems to have been widely accepted.

  It was a political situation which placed a premium on ambiguity. Parnell managed to be all things to all men. His aristocratic connections reassured the stronger farmers. They refused to believe that he was being really serious when he made some of his more radical statements which seemed to threaten their interests. On the other hand, the smaller farmers and agricultural labourers were reassured by his criticisms of the graziers and his apparent special concern with their views. It would be wrong to suggest that Parnell was purely opportunist in this respect. Many years later, when the heat had gone out of the battle, Parnell was still a notable critic of the Irish grazing system and of Irish strong cattle farmers in general. He was also prepared to make personal sacrifices for the rural poor and break up some of his own grassland for their benefit. Nevertheless, the strong farmers were right in their belief that Parnell simply did not have the stomach for the social strife implied by some of his more ‘root and branch’ project
s.56

  5

  By the turn of the year the Land League was established as the national organisation of the mass of the tenantry. Most of the Irish peasantry seemed to be determined not to pay the landlords their due rents. As this became more and more clear in the autumn of 1880 W. E. Forster, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, had begun to press the other members of the government to bring in coercion. Gladstone and other members of the cabinet were, however, reluctant to take this step. London opinion was well aware of the problems associated with a coercion policy. All that liberal Britain was capable of was a ‘teasing, worrying coercion’57 which would not deliver social order in Ireland. In September a decision was taken to prosecute Parnell and other leaders, including Mayo activists such as P. J. Gordon for conspiring to prevent the payment of rents and the taking of farms from which tenants had been evicted, for resisting the process of ejectment and generally creating ill-will among Her Majesty’s subjects. It was inevitable that no fairly empanelled Dublin jury—as was revealed in January 1881—would convict Parnell on these charges. It was inevitable also that the government would then attempt to introduce internment.

  The coercion debates that followed in February 1881 were notable primarily because they had a remarkable effect in helping to transform the Irish Parliamentary Party into a specifically Parnellite party. The Irish MPs who opposed the legislation had no hope of ultimate success, but they fought their corner admirably. Not only did Parnell find himself working with more Irish representatives than ever before, but also a new level of parliamentary unity and combativity was attained. Irish orators who had been unsure of their ground on the agrarian issue found their voices wonderfully when the issue became the more general one of the constitutional liberty of Irishmen. It was a field in which these young men—many of them budding lawyers—were natural experts. It was for the new young Parnellite lieutenants an intoxicating experience in which they decisively proved themselves. In the midst of all this clamour, Parnell himself made major attempts to explain to British politicians the conservative ethos that lay behind his apparently aggressive public pronouncements. Not surprisingly, his efforts were greeted with incomprehension.